Newark, 1944, When Polio Disrupted the Playground

Philip Roth’s latest protagonist is not one of his self-conscious writer-heroes, like Nathan Zuckerman or Peter Tarnopol, who spend their lives turning sentences around and contemplating the equation between life and art. No, he’s a simple Newark gym teacher who in the summer of 1944 is supervising the neighborhood playground, watching the boys play ball and the girls jump rope. In Mr. Roth’s new novel, “Nemesis,” it’s the summer when a polio epidemic sweeps through the city, spreading anxiety and suspicion.

Like his 2008 book, “Indignation,” “Nemesis” is a modest undertaking: a small-scale portrait of an era and of an earnest young man who finds the unstoppable engine of history steamrolling over his life. In this case, Bucky Cantor, 23, is one of the neighborhood’s few young men who aren’t off fighting the war; although he wanted to enlist along with his two best friends, he was rejected by all the services because of his terrible eyesight. The sense of duty instilled in him by his grandfather has made him feel guilty about not being able to serve his country. He feels “ashamed to be seen in civilian clothes, ashamed when he watched the newsreels of the war at the movies.”

Still, as Mr. Roth’s narrator recalls, Bucky is venerated by the neighborhood boys as “the most exemplary and revered authority we knew, a young man of convictions, easygoing, kind, fair-minded, thoughtful, stable, gentle, vigorous, muscular — a comrade and leader both.” The boys admire Bucky’s athletic skills, and they look up to him as a role model — especially after he faces down a gang of menacing teenagers.

Bucky resembles Marcus, the hero of “Indignation,” in that he’s the very paradigm of niceness. He is not torn, as so many Roth heroes famously are, between responsibility and transgression, tradition and rebellion. He doesn’t even have a sense of humor — doesn’t engage in irony or sarcasm, and rarely speaks in jest. Whereas “Portnoy’s Complaint” was an outrageously comic tale about the throwing off of duty, “Nemesis” is a pleasantly told parable about the embrace of conscience — and what its suffocating, life-denying consequences can be.

That Bucky is such a one-dimensional character makes for a pallid, predictable story line in which the random workings of fate and the fate of temperament — rather than genuine free choice — are the narrative drivers. It’s all a bit by the numbers, though Mr. Roth executes Bucky’s story with professionalism and lots of granular period detail.

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Philip RothCredit
Nancy Crampton

As he did in “The Plot Against America” (2004) — a novel with much bigger ambitions and a sweeping historical canvas — Mr. Roth conjures up World War II-era Newark and a Jewish neighborhood, where the routines of daily life are suddenly ruptured by fear. This time it’s not anti-Semitism that’s arrived, but polio, which has abruptly stricken two boys from the playground: Herbie Steinmark, a “chubby, clumsy, amiable eighth grader who, because of his athletic ineptness, was usually assigned to play right field and bat last,” and Alan Michaels, another eighth grader, who “was among the two or three best athletes” and “the boy who’d grown closest to Mr. Cantor.”

At the time, no one understands how polio spreads, and as more and more children succumb to the disease, panic and paranoia proliferate. Neighbors of the families with sick children call for quarantines; a local hot dog joint is shunned; and a mentally disabled man named Horace is accused of being a carrier.

Bucky tries to be a calm, stoic parental figure for the children, but he is shaken by an outburst from a hysterical mother with two sick boys. She accuses Bucky of letting them “run around like animals” on the baseball field, of letting them drink from the public fountain, of failing to look after the children’s welfare.

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Bucky’s girlfriend, Marcia, wants him to quit his job and join her as a counselor at a camp in the Poconos, far from the contagion. At first he resists her, arguing that he has a responsibility to stay in Newark, but as more of his young charges fall sick, he tumbles into a full-blown existential crisis. In wondering how God could allow such innocent kids to suffer, he begins to wonder how God could have let his mother die in childbirth, how God could be so heartless and cruel.

Racked with doubt and anger and fear for his own health, Bucky impulsively changes his mind and accepts the camp job. He tells his boss in Newark that he is resigning and is soon in the bucolic Poconos with his beloved Marcia. For a few days, everything is idyllic: Bucky bonds with his new charges and exults in the lovely country air — so pure, so cool, so uncontaminated. And then everything changes: one of the boys in Bucky’s cabin falls ill and is rushed to the hospital. The epidemic has arrived at the camp, and Bucky thinks, “Who brought polio here if not me?”

Given Bucky’s personality and history, it’s not hard for the reader to figure out what happens next, even if Mr. Roth makes the aftermath a lot more melodramatic than you might expect. It’s not unmoving, exactly, but all a little synthetic — less like a vintage Roth narrative than like a very well-executed O. Henry story, complete with a deliberately ironic plot twist and a sentimental outcome.

NEMESIS

By Philip Roth

280 pages. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $26.

A version of this review appears in print on October 5, 2010, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Newark, 1944, When Polio Disrupted the Playground. Today's Paper|Subscribe